Many Happy Returns
by tielan
Summary: Clint thinks about asking Director Fury if he usually hires the insane as his secret agents or if it's just him and Coulson. Probably not a question to ask in his first week at SHIELD.


**NOTES: **written for the be_compromised secret santa challenge on LJ.

**Many Happy Returns**

Coulson is already in the room when Clint walks in for his first briefing as a SHIELD operative. He doesn't glance up from the folder he's reading, merely turning a page.

"Good morning, Agent Barton."

Does the man ever sleep? Look tired? Have a hair out of place? And what's with the cupcake on the table next to the folder that, presumably, holds Clint's mission briefing?

"What the fuck is this?"

"A cupcake," Coulson says, ticking something off in his folder. "Many happy returns of the day."

Clint stares at it, wanting to ask if the guy is for real, but also wanting to laugh. It's a fucking cupcake. With purple icing and a little chocolate arrow on top. And Agent Coulson doesn't look like he's about to break out the smirk – he looks quite serious.

"This isn't a bomb is it?"

"Is it ticking?"

"A secret weapon?"

"It's a cupcake."

"Red light, green light, mash it together, hasta lasagna, don't get any of it on ya?"

"I never liked that movie." Coulson sits back in his chair. "And it's just a cupcake. You don't have to eat it if cupcakes aren't your poison, I'm sure I'll find someone else to have it instead."

"So is this a SHIELD thing?"

"No, this is an Agent Coulson thing." The older man smiles thinly. "Ask Director Fury if you're in doubt."

Clint looks at the cupcake. Thinks about asking Director Fury if he regularly hires maniacs as his secret agents or if it's just him and Coulson. Probably not a question to ask in his first week.

"So," he says, "who do you need shot?"

"His name is Demetrius Poulos, and he's been stealing nuclear waste deliveries from shipments going through the Ukraine…"

* * *

The safehouse has one bed and a couch in the single room. A partitioning screen gives a semblance of separation but there's not really going to be any privacy.

"Ladies take the bed," Clint tells Romanov as he dumps his gear on the coffee table.

She glances around the room and he can see her cataloguing the strengths and weaknesses of the place. Well, old habits die hard; if it was his first time here, he'd be checking out the exits, too.

He crosses the room, gives the street a cursory look and throws up the sash to let the evening breeze blow through. The safehouse hasn't been used in a while and it smells a bit musty.

"We'll be here for two nights?"

"Not your usual level of accomodation?"

She gives him a cool look, as though she suspects he's pulling her leg. "Somewhat better, actually. Is it usual for SHIELD to reuse their safehouses?"

"Saves having to buy and sell a lot," Clint notes as he pulls up the middle cushion on the couch, and pulls out the mission folder that another agent left there this morning in the guise of a cleaner. "We've got our brief."

He kicks his duffel under the coffee table and tips out the files across the top. Mission brief, surveillance photos, observation notes, suggestions. He looks over the brief first, then discards it in favour of working through the surveillance photos.

After a moment, Romanov sits down on the couch beside him and picks up one of the sets of notes about the target's movements. "Four bodyguards does not seem like much," is her first observation.

"Would an army be too much for you?"

"Possibly," she says after a moment. "Although it would be easier if I had a Nikonov."

Clint snorts as he looks at the various shots of the target and the men and women who flow around him in the photograph series. Romanov has an odd sense of humour for a woman who was brought up to be an assassin – but then, it's not as though Clint is stock standard agent material.

He sits back and stares at the photographs. There's a lot here to process. Just as well they have two days before the mission.

"This is thirsty work. Want a drink?"

"Water, please."

The safehouses are kept stocked – usually with a few beers, some soda, and the basic fixings – but sometimes with extra bits and pieces, depending on the handler and their sense of humour.

This refrigerator was definitely stocked by Coulson.

The beer and sodas are slotted down on the lower racks leaving the topmost rack empty – but for a single cupcake. Purple. Dotted with little white flowers and stuck with a blue candle.

"Is that for you?" Romanov comes to stand at his shoulder. "Is it your birthday?"

"It's an in-joke," Clint says, without elaborating on the birthday thing.

Romanov tilts her head at the cupcake, and then at Clint. "You have an odd sense of humour at SHIELD."

Clint snorts. "Sweetheart? You have no idea."

* * *

The bar is a hole-in-the-wall downtown and full of business types. Outside, thunder crashes and the rain beats down on the sea of black umbrellas as a gold-trimmed red tram trundles by.

The package was acquired without any major crises, no deaths necessary, although one of the security guards at the site will need a major knee reconstruction if he's ever going to walk again.

Natasha orders _pulpo medallones_, _bocherone_, _anchoa_, _croqueta_, _berenjenas_, and _bocadillo de chorizo_, gets Clint a cider and herself a Montilla, and watches the people go by.

The place would be considered Mestizo in America – here, it's 'Spanish tapas'. But it's apparently well-recommended, and busy. In spite of the weather, a line builds outside the bar.

"Happy Birthday," she says as the drinks come. "I didn't get you a present."

"You got us out alive," Clint replies, thinking grimly of a people who don't use guns - and the scary other things they use instead. They managed to make it out, but whoever set up that base definitely had a twisted brain. "That's present enough."

She smiles – a subtle twitch of her mouth that that conveys more amusement than the loud laugh of the blonde over in the corner booth and which Clint values far more – and clinks her glass against his again. "To getting out alive and together, then."

And Clint, as he drinks, thinks the 'together' part is probably about as important to him as the 'alive' part. It's getting to be like that.

* * *

"This is not staying under the radar, Clint!"

"Nope," he yells back in her ear under the clash of the music and the cheer of the crowd in the bar. "That's the point!"

Natasha sounds exasperated. "I don't even know the words!"

"It's karaoke – look, there's words up on the screen - you don't have to remember them! And you have to do this – it's my birthday present!"

"_Bozhe moi_," she mutters, not quite soft enough that he can't hear. And then something that he can't pronounce but which he knows pretty much means 'I'm surrounded by idiots'.

She could back out, leave him to sing alone.

She doesn't.

Instead she hooks an arm around his waist and sings 'Waterloo' with him – out of rhythm and barely in-key. It's no worse than some of the drunken numbers tonight, and Clint even manages to harmonize. Sort of. It doesn't matter anyway. They're SHIELD agents, not contestants on The Voice. For which the world should be truly grateful.

Hours later, sprawled on a queen-sized motel bed, tired and tipsy and hoarse, Natasha flops over to look at him. "I like Kansas."

Clint turns his head on the bed to regard her. "Okay, now you're worrying me."

Her mouth spreads into a grin – a lovely, glowing thing that heats his gut and catches at his breath. Sure, she's a gorgeous woman, he's thought about her that way. But a man doesn't put the moves on a woman who can kill him unless he's pretty sure that she's not going to take offense at his asking, and that he's not going to screw it up.

He can't guarantee either of those things, and their partnership – their _friendship_ - is too precious for him to risk.

So he looks back away.

* * *

There are better ways to spend his birthday than watching Natasha seduce a target.

Clint watches anyway. It's his job to be divorced from his emotions, to do the job and not think about what doing the job actually entails. He's usually quite good at it – courtesy of being a killer long before SHIELD recruited him to be a killer with a purpose.

But this is difficult.

He's seen Natasha seduce men before. He's watched her walk out of long-term missions in which she played the girlfriend for weeks or months at a time. He's sat in the living space while she washed her persona away, put her own clothes on, and left everything that belonged to the other woman who was her behind to become Natasha Romanov again.

This is different.

"You're sure you want to be here?" Hill inquires from the control desk in the back of the van.

"If I didn't, I wouldn't." Clint keeps his voice just as cool as hers, even though he knows she's not being deliberately unsympathetic, just doing her duty. Then, because he's curious, and there've been rumours about Hill and another agent, he asks, "How difficult is it to manage a relationship within SHIELD?"

She gives him a hard look. "A practical question?"

"Just theoretical."

"Depends on the relationship and the person you're having it with," she says after a moment.

"Not exactly helpful in the general sense."

"Generally? I wouldn't recommend it," she adds with an expression that suddenly resembles the look Coulson gives him when he knows Clint is going to do something of which he disapproves. "But why should that matter to you?"

* * *

Clint half-turns when Natasha's hand covers his as he unlocks the door of their garret apartment. "Tash—?"

Her mouth covers his, a soft enfolding of lips, light as a butterfly. He catches his breath – and hers – his heart beginning to pound a heavy drumbeat against his ribs.

They've kissed before – faking it while undercover.

This isn't faking it.

She holds something back when they're faking it – he's not sure what. But he can feel the desire in her as she nestles into his arms, pushing him back against the door. It's in the way her hands clench a little on his hips as she angles her head to draw him in deeper. It's in the catch of her breath as one hand slides under the curls at her nape and the other clenches in the small of her back.

It's been a difficult month. New Mexico and Loki; then the helicarrier and New York. Playing 'least-in-sight' lest the Council decides they want an easier target than Fury, and then turning up at Coulson's funeral with the Avengers – a declaration of allegiance. Paperwork and headshrinks, and then, yesterday, finally, a mission with SHIELD.

It's been a long month.

Right now, none of that registers.

What registers is the long, slow stroke of her tongue against his and the rhythm of her hips against his rapidly-swelling cock. The slide of her skin under his fingertips, brush of her breasts against his chest.

"I'm not going to go easy on you, Clint," she murmurs against his jaw, and her lips have found a ridiculously sensitive place just beneath his ear – or maybe it's ridiculously sensitive because it's her lips.

"I'm not going to break," he tells her. "But you'd better be sure about this, Tasha."

"I am." The words are simple, and her gaze is very direct and very heated as she lifts her head to look him in the eye. "I want _us_." Her hand reaches past his waist and turns the doorknob, opening the door behind him. "Do you?"

Clint doesn't answer her in words.

* * *

He hears Natasha's laugh echo out from the kitchen – a rare snicker of amusement. "Clint?"

"Whazzup?"

"You'd better get in here."

After the night they just had, she wants him to get up? Clint sighs, but he's already awake. And they can always go back to bed afterwards.

He rolls out of bed and doesn't bother with clothing as he pads over to the tiny kitchenette in the garret room. Natasha's standing in front of the open door of the fridge.

Clint comes over to rest his chin on her shoulder and snorts.

It's not a large fridge, but it's full of purple cupcakes.

**fin**


End file.
